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Caviare and Mock Caviare
The true caviare must be bought. It is usually eaten as a relish, with dry toast, pepper, lemon-juice, or vinegar and oil. When fresh, the taste is rather like that of oysters. It is made of the roe of sturgeon. Mock caviare is made by pounding boned anchovies, with a clove of garlic; then mixing with the paste lemon-juice or vinegar, salt, cayenne, and a few drops of salad-oil. It should be served spread thinly on bread and butter or toast. Time to prepare, about half an hour. Probable cost, anchovies, 1s. per half-pint bottle.
The first half is a note on buying caviare; the workable recipe is the mock version, an anchovy paste of the sort Victorian kitchens turned out by the mortarful. It gives no quantities, so treat the following as the working ratios.
- Quantities to start fromAbout 12 anchovy fillets (roughly 50 g drained) to half a small clove of garlic, a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar, a good pinch of cayenne, and no more than half a teaspoon of oil. That yields enough to spread over eight or ten small toasts.
- Boned anchoviesThe book assumes whole salt-cured anchovies sold in bottles, which had to be split and the backbone pulled out. Oil-packed fillets need no boning; drain and blot them. If you use salt-packed fish, rinse thoroughly and soak 10 minutes or the paste will be inedibly salty.
- Hold back the saltSalt appears in the ingredient list, but modern anchovies are already heavily cured. Taste before adding any at all.
- One clove of garlic is a lotRaw garlic in a paste this small will dominate everything. Half a clove, crushed to a smooth purée with a little salt so no fragments remain, is closer to what the dish wants.
- PoundingA mortar gives a better texture than a processor, which tends to whip air into the paste and turn it pale. If you use a machine, pulse rather than run it.
- Half an hourThe stated time presumably allows for boning and pounding by hand. With prepared fillets and a mortar it is a five-minute job.
- Serving and keepingSpread thinly, as directed — thickly applied it is overwhelming. Refrigerate in a covered pot and eat within two or three days; the garlic sharpens and the oil picks up other flavours quickly.
- The cost lineA shilling per half-pint bottle puts anchovies within reach of a household store cupboard. Bottled anchovies were commonly sold by such measures, though the recipe records only the price and the size.
Caviare reached British tables as an imported luxury, chiefly from Russia and the Caspian, and the word itself is generally traced through Italian and Turkish to Persian khāviyār. Cassell's is candid that there is nothing to teach — the true article "must be bought" — and so does what Victorian household books habitually did with an expensive foreign delicacy: offers a domestic imitation built from a cheap preserved fish. Anchovy paste was already a fixture of the British larder in various guises, and the pounded-anchovy "mock" versions of costlier relishes belong to the same thrifty tradition as mock turtle soup and mock crab. One thing has changed beyond the kitchen: the wild sturgeon species that supplied nineteenth-century caviare are now protected under international trade controls, and the roe sold today comes almost entirely from farmed fish.